ffxiv Archives - Page 29 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Finishing Heavensward

July 6, 2015 by Belghast

Trying to Break Me

When we planned this four day weekend of house manipulation… I knew somewhere along the lines I would end up harming myself. Now I have any number of minor injuries from the weekend including that time I sliced my finger open and bled all over the old PC I was pulling a hard drive from, or the time I got my arm pinched behind something and created a really strange bruise on my wrist. However yesterday I took my self mutilation to a new level, as I was carrying the final box out to the car for the last Goodwill load of the weekend. I went to set the box down carefully because it had something poking out of it… and I apparently lost my balance and wound up rolling down the driveway towards the mailbox. The end result is that I have one exceptionally banged up and bruised knee that makes it hard to walk, a second banged up knee that is far better off, and a wrist that I am guessing I have tweaked a bit because I ultimately landed on it. I am completing ignoring the piece of chat that seems to be embedded in my palm because in the grand scheme of things that one is just minor.

At this point I am trying to alternate between staying off my knee an getting up every so often and walking a bit to keep it from freezing up too bad. At the same time I am keeping ice packs on it every few hours which seems to be helping. The above photo is actually a massive improvement from yesterday when my knee cap itself was roughly five times its normal size. Today it hurts a lot less to stand on my knee, but a lot more to touch it… so I am hoping that means most of the trauma is just as a surface level and not actually effecting the joint itself. It seems like the pain in walking was mostly related to the swelling. Today actually my bigger complaint is my wrist that hurts like the dickens when I twist it. Thankfully nothing seems broken… except my pride. More than anything I just feel stupid for falling. I feel stupid that it happened on quite literally the last box… which in itself was an after thought. I am just thankful that while I put myself in a bit of pain that it seems like I am still fairly sturdy.

Finishing Heavensward

In similar fashion to 2.0 the end of the 3.0 story concludes in a series of group story content. Thankfully however it seems they have learned their lesson and instead of making long eight player dungeons, they created a single four player story mode dungeon and an extremely fun trial encounter. I won’t go into much detail about either because spoilers… but this time around they managed to get the risk and reward equation just right. I’ve now run the four player story dungeon I think four times, and will happily run it as many times as needed because at face value it is worth 80 Tomestones of Law, and when you factor in the “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it… you get 120 tomestones for what is a relatively quick dungeon run. Similarly while the trial only rewards 10 tomestones per run, it is fast enough and enjoyable enough that when we mentioned last night that we needed people to run it… folks jumped at the chance just to see it again.

Just like 2.0 the 3.0 credit roll resolves some of the current conflicts… but opens up just as many questions about our future. As it stands right now I am completely amped to se what 3.1 brings, because things happened… and I am intrigued as to how they will resolve. This is the thing that I love so much about the way Final Fantasy XIV expansions seem to work. They end on this warm and fuzzy point… but at the same time feel like you just completed the games introduction. You know that there is going to be twice as much content before you see the end of expansion credit roll. The only thing I am finding myself really disappointed in is my class quests. They felt disconnected and extraneous to the Heavensward content. Now I hear that some quests especially that of the summoner is deeply connected to this expansion, however for the Warrior which is the class I took to 60 first… it was a fun romp with axes but nothing more. I remember having a serious difficult time with my level 50 warrior quests… and nothing that I experienced in this expansion class quest wise even caused me to break a sweat.

And my Axe, and This Dungeon

At the launch of 2.0 getting Tomestones of Philosphy was a very painful grind, and as such it lead most of us to stop playing the game. When we came back they managed to fix some of these problems and we were able to actually get into the end game content. It seems like they have learned their lessons because the Tomestones of Law grind seems exceptionally easy. In the very meager content that I managed to run, I gathered up the 570 I needed for my weapon. Since I also had been running a significant number of Clan Hunts I managed to gather up the 395 seals needed to get the item to upgrade my 170 axe into a 180. So far I am really liking the way this works, you do dungeon content to get tomestones to buy the gear… then do hunts to get the bits to upgrade them instead of relying on random chance at getting a drop from a raid somewhere. My hope is that in short order I will be able to finish my law set and be in raiding form. For the moment I will be focusing on my worst slots first, so that I can improve my viability the most… as quickly as possible.

Last night I also managed to tank my very first level 60 dungeon, called the Fractal Continuum. I have to say I like this dungeon already so much more than I liked the whole Wanderers Palace/Amdapoor Keep thing that we had at the launch of 2.0. The other dungeon available is called Neverreap and I have yet to run it, but have heard it is similarly enjoyable. I have to say it was plenty challenging, especially the last encounter but at this point we are in essence a raid experienced group of players and were able to rely on mechanics we learned while raiding to defeat the encounters. I feel that the game set a pretty realistic starting gear place as well, in that you have to be at least ilvl 155 to run it. There is a gear vendor out in the final zone that should help players “catch up” and fill out any slots they have serious deficiencies in. I personally need to pop out there and check the vendor myself because I still have a few aging quest rewards. I feel like I am pretty happy with the state my next few months will be in as I gear out my jobs and level the ones that are not sixty.

Ding 60 Warrior

July 5, 2015 by Belghast

The End is Near

This morning I have places on my body that are sore that I did not even know existed. That said I feel like we have accomplished a lot this extended weekend. Essentially my office and my wife’s office have not seen a major clean and reorganize in over a decade. As a result mine especially was this dysfunctional hell hole, that I simply lacked the oomph or planning to figure out how to fix. I’ve talked about the things I didn’t like about my setup for awhile, and my wife being the master planner that she is came up with a plethora of options… some of which we finally implemented this weekend. Similarly she really has not used her office in a year and a half for various reasons, and really wanted to go into the new school year with the ability to use it as a functional work space. For me I wanted the ability to broadcast easier and simply have just a more comfortable space to hang out in.

Originally the plan was to just work from Friday through Sunday… but on a whim I opted to take Thursday off as well. Quite honestly I have no clue how I would have even come close to finishing were it not for taking Thursday off. That was essentially the day I realized just how deep the rabbit hole went. We’ve taken a lot out to the dumpster we rented, and we are now working on preparing our second load to good will. But last night I managed to get the office essentially configured. Right now there is a lot more organizational stuff to do as I box up all of the miscellaneous cables that I have laying around from tearing down my computers the first time. Similarly there are a few places in my office where I want to add some sort of cabinet or shelving but the above picture I took last night shows the basic layout. So far I am really happy with it, and I think it is going to work well for the long run. The mission for today is to set back up all of my consoles and rewire them to the PC via the Elgato.

Ding 60 Warrior

With all the activity during the day, I have to admit I have been crashing pretty early most evenings during this break. When I logged out Friday night I was roughly a sixth of a level away from 60, and figured a couple of dungeon runs would get me there. Through out the day yesterday there were a few times where I took a break, but didn’t want to talk as much time as a dungeon run would require. As such I started working on my clan hunts, thinking that I could dink my way through a few creatures at a time and get some experience in the process. Clan Hunts are worth a surprising amount of experience, so as you are leveling seriously… do not over look them. By the time I wound down for the night and wrapped up the clan hunts I was within a stones throw of 60. When Thalen asked if I would be willing to tank the Library for him and Solaria… I jumped at the chance because I knew without a doubt I would ding inside of there.

Sure enough on the way to the second boss I dinged and also managed to pick up a few more items including this spiffy helmet… that doesn’t really thematically match its chest piece… but is still cool nonetheless. Upon getting out of the dungeon I did the last few quests that allowed me to unlock the first of the level 60 dungeons, and I am hoping to run that today. It took me almost exactly two weeks to hit the level cap, which is pretty good as far as I am concerned. I did not have the raw time to throw at this game that some of our other free company members did, but I still feel like I moved through the content fairly quickly. Now I can go back and start working on leveling my army of alt jobs, so that I can be multifunctional once again. That is honestly the thing I have missed the most while leveling… is the fact that right now I am “only” a tank. I know I have lamented this several times, but it is my hope to at least get the dragoon up there quickly. Now begins the fun end game gearing process that I obsess over so much.

Moogles are Lazy

Due to the Independence Day holiday we opted to record this show a little early this week, and instead of spending Saturday night talking about games, we spent Friday night. As a result there are several of us who were not quite to level 60 in Final Fantasy XIV but have since caught up and pushed through to the level cap. However we spent a good deal of time not talking about FFXIV. Grace managed to finish the crazy attunement system in Wildstar and attended her very first raid. She gives her opinion of the system and how it compares to WoW and FFXIV raiding. Additionally we go down the rabbit hole that is the Four Job Fiesta and talk Final Fantasy V and the various group compositions fate has given us this year. I apparently was one job off from the legendary group composition that the person who started the event go their first year: Monk, Berserker, Beastmaster and Dancer. Instead the gods saw fit to give me a Samurai so I could quite literally “pay to win”.

We purposefully saved our discussion of Heavensward to the end of the show because I knew that was the one thing we were all playing. It is extremely difficult to discuss this game without going into spoilers, so there are some details that might be spoiled if you have not played up through the Aery dungeon yet. The awkwardness of this show was the fact that Ashgar is quite a ways behind the rest of us, making it extremely difficult to add to discussions… because at least one point during the show he made a conjecture that we knew the truth about, but could not really go into it for fear of spoiling key plot points. My theory is that once we have all finished the 3.0 story arc we will do yet another big “spoil everything” show, like we did for 2.55. The best snippet for me was when Grace decided to talk about her new loathing for Moogles after completing the Churning Mists zone. Moogles are in fact lazy bums.

The Ancient Library

July 4, 2015 by Belghast

Land of Lost Cables

This morning I feel like the world is angry at me. Namely we spent the last two days doing some hardcore cleaning and rearranging of both my and my wife’s offices. This involved taking loads of stuff to good will, and even more loads of stuff out to the dumpster we rented. However it feels like maybe the end is in sight. The funny thing about this process is I am finding things that I did not remember existed. Like for example… wedding pictures… I did not remember we had a book of wedding pictures. I realize that statement sounds weird… because everyone remembers photos at their wedding right? Well for us… we eloped and there was a pretty limited group of people that COULD have taken photos. I am guessing my cousin Sarah took the photos because she does not appear in any of them, but it was still kinda cool…. and god did we look young.

We also found a stack of photos from our college graduation… and apparently overall shorts were a big thing in 1998… because both my wife and my niece were wearing them. The other awesome thing about cleaning is finding all the things I have bought and re-bought a dozen times. Like right now I have bins labeled video, audio, usb and network… and all of them are overflowing with cables. I seriously should not need to get any form of a USB cable for example for life. I have every possible connector save for maybe USB 3. In addition I found more iPhone/iPad cables than I remember us ever having. So as I dismantle my office today to do the final leg of this process I should have more than enough cables to hook things up however I want to in the final configuration.

The Ancient Library

Since we are expected to participate in the Four Job Fiesta every single year… our circle of friends has developed a deep understanding of the content contained within Final Fantasy V… in part because Ashgar has such a deep understanding of said content. So when it was leaked that Heavensward would include the Library of Ancients needless to say we were a little excited. Thursday night I managed to get up to the appropriate level to do the dungeon, and last night after all of the cleaning I sat down and managed to get a guild group to run it. I have to say I am really damned impressed with the experience and this might be my favorite dungeon yet… which is a pretty mighty feat considering I really really love The Vault, with its Scarlet Monastery 2.0 feel. What is best is the way that many of the mobs pop out of books just like they did in Final Fantasy V. In fact one of the mobs that you run into over and over is good ole page 64.

As you might suspect it has the ability to cast level 5 doom… which apparently plays by the rules set forth in Final Fantasy V. This means players who are 59 are unaffected, but those level 60 players have to get the hell out or they straight up die. Granted we have not actually tested this, so it might just be a rumor. Once again I streamed my run of the dungeon so that I could capture it in video form. The absolute best part of the dungeon is of course Byblos which takes the place of the middle boss. The best part is when you kill him he says “Soon, the seal of the master will be open.” I love it when Final Fantasy XIV does some fan service and so accurately depicts a mob from another game in this one. One thing I learned is that the Gale Cut attack can be completely avoided if you just move from out of front of him when he is casting it. So far every dungeon in Heavensward has been better than the last, so I am completely amped to see what the end game dungeons are going to be like.

The Road to Sixty

The library finally paid off and I started to get some warrior drops. The set that comes from the Library is one that I am going to have to farm up because I either look like a Sherlock Holmes era inspector or a refugee from Diagon Alley. In either case I am a fan of it, and it looks pretty adorable when I run around like this. Tam is going to be quick to point out that this is not a plate set of armor… and I will give him that. It is very much not plate, but instead a cloth robe… but it looks adorable so I am just going with it for the time being. The only thing that I have yet to see at all this expansion is a weapon drop. Every single dungeon seems to drop a nice weapon, but in all cases I have seen zero axes. As a result I am struggling through on the HQ white weapons that you get through the storyline. I figure soon enough I will be able to purchase a nice end game weapon as after last nights shenanigans I am roughly a sixth of a level away from sixty.

My hope is tonight… in my newly arranged office… I will be able to push the rest of the way into sixty. It seems there is a dungeon that folks are waiting to run that comes at the end of the main storyline. I am more than happy to tank for my friends… I just have to get to max level first. As horrible as 58 was… I have to say so far 59 has been pretty chill. Just through pushing through the main storyline in the final area and then doing some side quests and two dungeon runs… I have been able to conquer most of this level. Had I managed to actually do my clan hunts yesterday rather than getting pulled straight into a dungeon I might have dinged last night before logging. In theory I could do that tonight and hit the cap… then catch up on the last bit of story that leads to the final dungeon. My god… the story… things happen and I want so bad to talk about them, but most of my readers I would assume are not quite there yet.

Bismarck Harpooned

July 3, 2015 by Belghast

Depths of Madness

As I warned you all, I am writing this the night before I intend to post it… at 11pm after a fairly long day of working on our little side projects. Essentially the offices of both myself and my wife need reorganizing in the worst possible way. Neither has really been torn apart and put back together in a very very long time. In fact a good chunk of today was spent shedding documents… from 2005 or so that we kept for god knows what reason. I had forgotten just how many bills and statements used to pile up from the mail… that are now delivered electronically. So I spent my time alternating between shredding documents until the shredder overheated… and boxing up things I no longer needed or wanted for Goodwill.

The problem being that I feel completely overwhelmed in how much is still left to go through. I am horrible about just boxing things up to get it out of the way… so I have several of these boxes loaded with miscellaneous stuff. So this whole mission is part de-cluttering but even more important a sifting of things back into logical bins. At the same time I am trying to make my computer space more friendly, and have a better option for hooking up my console systems and still being able to capture footage from them through my computer. Another thing I am trying to do is to give myself a workspace where I can fiddle with computers or more importantly assemble the mountain of Lego sets I have. Then I am trying to free up some additional room to have places to display said Legos when I finally get them together. Needless to say the next few days are going to be busy.

Bismarck Harpooned

If you have ready this blog for any period of time, you will know that I am pretty much willing to get drug into anything if a guild member needs it. There are some exceptions that I avoid like the plague… I am looking at you Aurum Vale. However if the need is great enough I can always get my arm twisted enough to run whatever it is. Bismarck on the other hand is an encounter that I truly enjoy, so the moment someone mentions that I almost jump at the chance to run it. What makes Bismarck so interesting is the fact that it is a vastly different style of primal fight. While you are ultimately in a fight against the giant flying whale, you are having to deal with a lot of different elements rather than fighting it directly. The goal is to fire two giant harpoons into the whale that allow you to wench it to the side of the island you are standing on. From there you can dps down its weak spot. To make things more interesting you have to deal with all sorts of weather effects, different sorts of adds, and the whale itself slamming into the platform periodically.

The funny thing about pugging a Primal encounter is that you never fully understand the mechanics at work unless someone actually takes the time to explain them. One of the mechanics that we did not grasp completely was what exactly to do with the water globules during phase three. It took us three attempts to get through Bismarck because we were essentially having to figure out what exactly to do with them. The first time we killed the adds and died to lightning damage, the second time we left the water globs up… and then took a massive burst of damage when they exploded. The real mechanic is a bit more subtle. If there is story weather happening, you leave the water globs up to soak the lightning damage which will ultimately kill them. If the skies are clear however… you kill the adds before they explode. Once we grasped this more clearly we wrecked this primal. I have a pretty nice video of our kill above that I edited out of my stream.

Finally Fifty Nine

The bulk of my evening was spent wandering around trying to find ways of getting experience. After having pretty good luck with Clan Hunts Wednesday night, I started off my evening getting a new set and working through those. It seems like they provide about an eighth of a level upon completing the first two tiers, which is nothing to sneeze at. After finishing these off I went back out to the Hinterlands to do quests for the crazy goblins within. These quests involve more than your normal amount of running around as you help them build their new perfect society. I managed to just have enough quests to push on through to 59 without any further dungeons or fate running. Now I am in the final stretch to 60, and I have heard it goes considerably faster. I also just unlocked the next dungeon, and I have been looking forward to running it since I first heard about it. Hopefully tomorrow before or after the podcast I will be able to pull together a group and run it. In the mean time however… I need to head to bed because we have to get up early tomorrow to deal with more cleaning.